pi-Stomp Manual Plugins

Instruments & Looping

Plug a USB or DIN keyboard into the pi-Stomp and it becomes a capable standalone synthesizer. The instrument pages cover what you can play through it and what each engine is good for. In contrast to the plugins we've looked at so far which colour your input signal, these plugins create sound from scratch: either based on MIDI or by playing back captured waveforms.

How we got here

Looping was a studio technique before it was a pedal. Two reel-to-reel machines set a distance apart, tape running from one to the other, output fed back to the input — that was the rig behind the long tape-delay pieces of the late 1960s and 70s, and the layering it allowed was a consequence of the physical setup rather than a feature anyone designed. Digital loopers put it in a rack in the mid-1990s and on the floor by 2001, and the reason it took over is a practical one: it turns a solo player into an ensemble without a laptop, a click, or another human being. That is exactly what the pi-Stomp's footswitches are for.

Synthesis reached stage performance earlier. Polyphony was the hard part — the Prophet-5 in 1978 was the first fully programmable polysynth, and the analog voice architecture it settled on (oscillators, a resonant filter, two envelopes) is what every plugin in this section still models. FM in 1983 undercut it on price and made everyone want their analog gear back, which is roughly where the virtual-analog revival started and why these plugins exist at all. The tonewheel organ is older than all of it and works nothing like either: ninety-one spinning metal wheels in front of pickups, additive rather than subtractive, and a Leslie cabinet to move the sound around the room.

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